Bad Piggies

Bad Piggies turned the famous series' perspective on its head — instead of demolishing pig fortresses, the player now helps the pigs, building them vehicles out of wood, engines, balloons, and rocket engines, trying to get them across an obstacle course to the finish line at the end of the level. The construction canvas works like a sandbox: parts snap onto a chassis, the player tests how the machine behaves in motion, and tweaks it until finding a combination that safely makes it across hills, chasms, or water obstacles.

Rovio built the game on the physics engine that previously only served to demolish structures in Angry Birds, and showed that the same tool could work in reverse, as a full-fledged building sandbox for experimentation. Instead of precise aiming, the emphasis here is on creativity and improvisation — most levels can be solved in several different ways, and the game rewards creativity with bonus stars for finishing speed or collecting items scattered along the way.

Visually it follows the same comic-book style as the parent series, but the humor shifts toward clumsy machines that fall apart at exactly the moment you least expect it, and crashes that often look funnier than the victory itself. This makes Bad Piggies, even years later, a pleasant detour for anyone who came to love the world of Angry Birds but wanted a completely different kind of puzzle than precise slingshot shooting at fixed targets.

Why play it: Ideal for players who enjoyed demolishing things in Angry Birds and would like to try the opposite task — building a functional, if imperfect, machine out of a pile of mismatched parts.